


How to Take a Test

by 2ndA



Series: Work That is Real (GK/HS AU) [1]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 21:24:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nate is an idealistic first-year teacher at low-performing Mathilda Memorial High School.  He needs all the help he can get. They say, those who can't, teach.  But maybe those who can't teach...do something less important.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Take a Test

**Author's Note:**

  * For [n00blici0us](https://archiveofourown.org/users/n00blici0us/gifts).



 

_"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past"_

 

**+++**

**Come prepared with all of your testing materials.**

Nate’s classroom is actually a double-wide trailer in the Mathilda Memorial High School upper parking lot. It has a high-tech smart whiteboard like a giant tablet on one wall and a ragged poster called “How to Take a Test” on another. The whiteboard doesn’t work; the cracked chalkboard is filthy. The trailer also contains 16 paperback dictionaries and 18 student desks. His smallest class—an elective called The Greco-Roman World—has 23 students.

He walks across the parking lot and a scrubby field with one sad football goal to the main building. It’s important to liase with staff at his placement. Teach for America has assured him of this. School starts in three days: it is late August and hot; Nate's button-down shirt is sticking to his back by the time he reaches the vice principals’ suite. Vice Principal Schwetje has barricaded himself into his office because it has a window air conditioner. A window air conditioner whose market value that probably exceeds Nate’s entire classroom budget. The VP blinks vaguely when Nate explains his predicament.

“So….you don’t need the dictionaries?”

“No,” Nate repeats himself. “That’s not what I’m saying. I might need them—in fact, I’ll probably need more of them. But right now, my problem is the desks. I don’t have enough for any of my classes.”

“Oh!” Schwetje’s furrowed expression clears like Nate has just started speaking English. “Don’t worry! You’ll never have a full roster of kids. I mean, you might have, say, eighteen kids registered for a class, but some of them never come.” That sounds like more of a problem than not having enough desks, but Schwetje seems to think it’s a good thing. “And how ‘bout those whiteboards?” the vice principal cheers. “Those’re something, right? We got a grant.”

Nate wants to ask why the grant money went to smartboards and air conditioners for the admin offices when the school needs books and desks, but he reminds himself to stay positive.

“They seem like a very effective teaching tool, sir. But I’m not sure mine is functioning properly.”

“Huh.” That distracted look returns to the VP’s face…Nate realizes it means the man is concentrating.“I guess you should talk to Meesh. He’s our technology coordinator….Or, no! No, you know who you should talk to?”

Nate doesn’t even bother to speak, just shakes his head. Of course he does not know who he should talk to. If he did, he would be _talking to them_. He wants information, not guessing games.

“You,” Schwetje prounounces, as proudly as if he had solved Nate’s problems himself,“You should talk to Brad.”

 

+++

On the way back to his trai—classroom, Nate runs into the media studies teacher, a wide-eyed newbie who used to be a journalist before print media tanked. He can’t remember the guy’s name, but Reporter already looks strung out just thinking about the school newspaper and the yearbook and all the other responsibilities he gets stuck with. “Oh, yeah,” he says distractedly when Nate mentions the whiteboard, “Brad could probably help with that. Not so sure about Meesh. Meesh once said he could hook me up with porn through the media center TV. I’m pretty sure the school board doesn’t allow that…”

“Brad is the man,” says Mr. Espera, overhearing them. He’s in the media center checking out a classroom-set of Cesar Chavez biographies. “If he can’t fix your technology—well, you’d best break out the stone tablets, ‘cause that shit ain’t gonna _be_ fixed. Computers and e-readers and all,” Mr. Espera shakes his head, “that’s some white-boy magic.”

Nate thinks he would love to be a fly on the wall in Mr. Espera’s Western Civ class. Of course, the wall is about the only place he could be: Mr. Espera’s smallest class has 34 students, and he only has 25 desks.

 

**+++**

  
**Read all instructions carefully. Pay attention to unfamiliar words.**

The first day of school is also the first (and last) time that Vice Principal Schwetje is right about anything. Nate does _not_ have a full homeroom roster. He still doesn’t have enough chairs for everyone, though, because a couple of kids spread out in the back row, taking up two or three chairs. The worst offender is a skinny kid in a hoodie, who has somehow distributed himself across four desks and fallen asleep despite the chaos going on around him.

Nate has been trying to take attendance, a task made impossible by the fact that kids keep moving to find more space, perching on other students’ desks or wandering out of the trailer to sit on the steps outside. He reminds two students that there is no smoking allowed on the high school grounds; he tells four students that they should not have their cellphones out during the school-day. Then he gives up and tries to hand out student schedules, in the hopes that kids might take the initiative and drift toward their first period classes. The usual procedure of calling out names and marking absent anyone who doesn’t respond cannot work in the cacophony of the trailer: every name Nate calls is met with a chorus of commentary.

“Lilley? Jason Lilley?”

“He’s here,” someone calls.

“No he ain’t.”

“Dude, I _saw_ him.”

“Nu-uh, I’d know cause he ride my bus.”

“Shit, motherfucker, you still ride the motherfucking bus?”

“You kiss your mama with that mouth?”

“Ain’t the only one I kiss…”

“Oooh, you nasty...”

Nate marks Lilley absent and tries again. “Evan Stafford?”

“Say who?”

“What he say again?”

“Stafford? Yo, Q-tip. Man called your name.”

“Heyo, called you _Evan_. That your name, Q? Evan? How gay is that? Can _I_ call you _Evan_?”

Finally, Nate gets most of the homeroom schedules distributed. He’s left with five for students who are absent, and nothing at all for the kid who is—astonishingly—still asleep in the back row. Nate squeezes between desks and climbs over bookbags to shake the boy awake. One dark eye flicks open. “Mnah?”

“Uh--hi. I’m Mr. Fick,” Nate is nearly shouting to be heard over the ruckus.“You’re not on my homeroom roster.”

The kid sits up, blearily. He scrubs a hand through his hair and uses the tail of his t-shirt to wipe the drool off his chin. Then, like someone’s thrown a switch, he wakes up: zero to sixty in five seconds. He squirms in his chair, eyebrows twitching, drumming his fingers on the desk in front of him, still taking up more than his fair share of space. “That’s ‘cause I’m not here.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m not, you know,” the kid waves his hand to encompass the room, “ _here_. Like, I’m not actually _in_ this homeroom. Just came by to talk to my homie, Walt. YO! WALT!” he shouts, as if to demonstrate. Across the room, a blond boy rolls his eyes and flips the bird without even turning from his conversation.

“Awww, you love me, don’t even lie! You couldn’t get through a goddamn day without your dearest pal, Ray-Ray,” the dark-haired kid—Ray-Ray?—makes kissy faces before returning his attention to Nate. “See? So, what-all you teach here, anyway?”

“Three blocks of test prep and an elective called the Greco-Roman world.” Nate replies automatically. He’s been slaving over his first week’s lesson plans since mid-August. Originally, he’d been promised an introductory Latin class, but Mathilda’s standardized test scores were so bad that the state had frozen the curriculum and mandated extra testing and study skills classes. The principal—Mr. Mattis, whom Nate has only seen from afar—thought a background in Classics would help with word derivations and vocabulary. The point seems to be to punish low-scoring students by boring them out of their skulls until they are finally persuaded to overcome their willfulness and pass California’s standardized testing.

Ray-Ray’s eyes get even bigger. “Greco-Roma…So, tell me,” he leans in confidentially, like they are discussing mutual acquaintances, “is it true the Greeks took it up the ass? Cause that sounds pretty fucking gay to me.”

“We probably won’t be discussing the homoerotic tendencies of the Greeks until at least second quarter,” Nate says, deadly serious. A split-second later, he realizes what he said. Christ, he must be in shock: the noise and the clamor and the two dozen teenagers have caused him to take temporary leave of his senses. He should have called Ray out on his language, enforced some sort of discipline. He’s going to be pilloried by the PTA… But Ray just looks at him, puzzled for a split second, and then throws his head back and laughs like a hyena.

“Homoro—homro—ho-mo-er-otic,” he manages at last. “Shit, you sound like Brad, talking all edjumacated and shit.”

 

**+++**

**If you don’t know an answer, skip it and come back to the question later.**

Nate had been on the Student Activities Panel at Dartmouth his junior year, in charge of handing out programs and taking tickets. That’s how he happened to be in the back of the auditorium when someone had asked a visiting poet-in-residence what had surprised him about teaching. The poet had taken a sip of water. “My students are all very bright,” he’d said, “but they think of education like a nice suit: something brand-name that their parents buy so they look good at job interviews. They don’t see education as a tool for making the world a fairer place.”

Nate, after three years of being asked what he was going to do with that Classics degree, had sat thunderstruck as the rest of the roundtable discussion went on around him. He’d been holding a stack of programs with a list of upcoming Student Activities events printed on the back: next month was an employment fair. There would be representatives from the Peace Corps and Teach for America.

At the time, it had seemed like fate. Now he wondered if it wasn’t a terrible mistake. It's Friday of his first week of teaching: he's been mentally revising his letter of resignation since Wednesday. His classroom now consists of 12 paperback dictionaries and 17 desks—one was broken when two students got into a fight over…God, Nate can’t even _remember_ now. It had been on Tuesday, the second day of school, which seems like ages ago. He’d marched them off to the vice principals' suite, filled out a discipline report form in triplicate, and then dashed back to find that the rest of the class had been occupying themselves, peaceably enough, texting photos of the broken desk or making paper airplanes out of dictionary pages. Well, most of the class: at least three students had decided to summarily dismiss themselves from school for the day. One girl, when Nate had asked her about it Wednesday, had explained that she had simply been too traumatized to continue with another half-hour of test prep. She’d looked up at him with big, teary eyes, just daring him to call her bluff, and then turned away to gossip with a friend about this cute boy on the bus.

The two exiled students returned to disrupt his next block class: apparently Vice Principal Sixta had lectured them for fifteen minutes about the importance of the dress code and then sent them on their way. It was on Wednesday that Nate had noticed that the 17 surviving desks were covered in scribbles and doodles: in three days, the beige wood veneer had gone nearly black with ink. He scrubbed five of them clean, planning to get to the rest on Thursday. But on Thursday, while Nate had been trying to coax a few more copies out of the antiquated Xerox machine in the media center, a couple of kids who should have been in gym class had accidentally started a small fire in the trashcan at the back of the trailer. That had cost him another few dictionaries before it was doused. In the afternoon, there had also been an altercation between three students who were drunk off the alcohol-based hand-sanitizer in the main school building. On Friday, with his painstakingly crafted lesson plans seeming more and more like a dream, Nate had simply assigned free writing to everyone, in a desperate attempt to get some baseline knowledge of their writing skills. Now he sat with a stack of ninety-seven essays and a killer headache.

The trailer is stifling. The air conditioner ran off a generator that made it impossible to hear anything anyone said, so Nate had pulled the plug. He'd had bought a fan at Mathilda’s Wal-Mart, but it didn’t seem to do much in the damp Indian summer. Looking out over the desks, Nate realizes he can’t even tell which ones he had cleaned on Wednesday: they’ve been doodled all over again. With the trailer empty, Nate can also see that graffiti has sprung up along the walls, some of it R-rated. He is studying it—instead of reshelving books, because really, why bother?—when he gets the distinct feeling that someone is watching him. He turns to see a tall blond man standing on the steps by the open door, as though waiting to be invited in.

“That’s what comes of having parents who praise every rainbow-and-lollipop crayon drawing produced by their pampered, special-snowflake offspring, sir,” the man nods at frieze of pornographic stick figures on the wall. “I mean—can you imagine? Blue ink! When magic marker is clearly called for.”

“Somewhere, Michelangelo is spinning in his grave,” Nate replies, straight-faced and just as dryly. His entire day has been completely surreal—why should this exchange be any different?

“Teenage philistines,” his visitor concurs, with a sharp, approving grin. “But what can you expect: Michelangelo learned his anatomy in the highly-controlled, patronage-based apprenticeship system of medieval Florence, not jerking off over Jasmin’s latest Playboy exclusive like these first-world reprobate wannabees.” The man shakes his head sadly. “We live in a degenerate age.”

Philistines? Degenerate? _Reprobate?_

“Brad, I presume?” That gets him a sharkish smile.

“Right in one: no wonder they let _you_ mold and shape the youth of tomorrow.”

 

+++

It turns out Brad is here to repair Nate’s faulty smartboard. Once he starts, he’s all business. Nate gets a firm handshake and then he is quite clearly dismissed from Brad’s attention while the taller man starts inspecting the malfunctioning equipment. Nate wanders back to his desk and picks up the first of the free-writing assignments. It’s Ray’s, and it appears to be a comic-book epic about a conspiracy theory involving pedophiles and Adolf Hitler. Ray is not even enrolled in any of Nate’s classes. Nate’s head throbs: if he doesn’t get some adult conversation, his brain is going to explode.

“This’ll be my first school year teaching,” he says, looking over to where Brad is poking through a meticulously organized toolbox. “I just moved from New Hampshire. Well—Maryland, really. But I went to school in New England.”

There is a long pause, the only sound the revolution of fan blades.

“So,” Nate tries again, “Are you from California?”

“Live in Oceanside.” Brad says, and spits onto one of the wires connecting the whiteboard to the wall.

Clearly it is up to Nate to keep any conversation going. He tries to remember what little he knows about the local geography. “Wow—that’s quite a drive every day.”

Brad shrugs. He is attaching the new cables to the wall with little wire pins, placed as neatly and precisely as though by machine. “Used to work out there. And as tempting as lovely downtown Mathilda is,” the sarcasm could peel paint, “I like being near the water. And I don’t mind driving…driven through worse.”

Now they’re getting somewhere.

“Did you work in a school? In Oceanside, I mean.” Brad shakes his head, but Nate is beginning to understand how Brad operates, so he doesn’t ask any follow up questions, just lets the silence grow thick and heavy.

“I was in the Marines,” Brad says at last, “there’s a base up in Oceanside.”

“Really? I thought about joining the military for a while.”

Brad gives a quick, sardonic glance over his shoulder, two pins in his mouth. “And, what, then you came to your senses?”

“No,” Nate is a little tired of having only part of Brad’s attention, so he decides to tell the truth: “Then I came out of the closet.”

“Hmm,” Brad says, like Nate has just told him the date. And that’s it. Nothing about his opinions on military policy, or how some of his best friends are…. Nate is watching Brad’s back, the set of his shoulders; he doesn’t even pause in the delicate tap-tapping of the wire pins. Three minutes later, Brad points at the board with a remote and it turns into a wall of pixels. He clicks a button and the Wikipedia homepage comes up.

“All of human knowledge, categorized, hyper-linked, and projected onto the wall of your whiskey-tango classroom. Pretty ninja, am I right?”

Nate looks from the screen to Brad’s satisfied expression, washed with reflected colors. It’s the first real enthusiasm Nate’s heard at Mathilda High, and pleasure changes Brad’s face so much that he forgets to even ask what whiskey tango means. When Brad hands him the remote, it feels like they’ve collaborated on something successful.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “That’ll be a huge help—I don’t think a paper encyclopedia would last very long.”

Brad nods. “I heard about the—” he gestures to burnt patch of paneling in the back of the room.

“I’m told they smuggled in an espresso machine,” Nate sighs.

“An _espresso_ machine? They nearly burnt this trailer down over an _espresso machine?!_ ”

Nate is pleased by Brad’s outrage: everyone else (including the administration) had shrugged and talked about _boys being boys_ and _broken homes_ and _cries for attention_.

“I might have a piece of corkboard you could put over it,” Brad eyes the paneling speculatively.

“Corkboard?”

“Look, you want top-drawer materials, go work in a charter school. Public school kids make do,” Brad shrugs and picks up his satchel of tools.

“Hey,” Nate says impulsively, before Brad can leave, “What did you want when you were a teenager?”

Brad forehead creases, puzzled. “What?”

Nate waves at the stacks of essays on his desk. “I’m trying to remember what I wanted out of school when I was their age.”

“Respectfully, sir, you practically _are_ their age.”—but that’s not true. Nate is older by at least five years, plus all the experiences that come with being privileged in America. Dartmouth is only the tip of the iceberg: there were family vacations and good public libraries, field trips and discipline codes and a house full of books where his parents asked about school every weeknight. He remembers high school, but only in flashes: lacrosse games, biking, cramming for Father Bonetti’s Latin exams.

“Seriously.”

Brad reaches up to turn off the board’s ceiling-mounted projector. He’s so tall, he doesn’t even have to stretch. “Seriously?—I think you’re going about this all wrong. Your pay-check comes from the state, and your coworkers all went to college, but your real colleagues….the people you’re working for and with, every day? They’re sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old kids. And you’re not here to be their friend, or their parent, or their shrink: you’re here to be their leader. You have to lead them to a place they need to be. Figure out the lay of the land, and then decide how to cross it. Anything else is a distraction from your mission. Observe, do not admire.”

Nate doesn’t know how that is supposed to help him keep order or get students passing state tests. He’s surprisingly disappointed that Brad doesn’t have the answers. He sits down at his desk, picks up Ray’s free writing assignment again: it doesn’t look any more intelligible this time.

“For what it’s worth, sir…” Nate looks up to see Brad standing on the threshold, almost apologetically. “When I was a teenager, I just wanted people to leave me alone.”

 

**+++**

**Eliminate obviously incorrect answers and then make your best guess.**

Nate observes that Ray is chronically incapable of sitting in a chair and that he raises his hand only when he knows he already has Nate’s attention. He observes that Lilley’s essays always mention at least one movie (usually junk like _Troy_ , but sometimes good stuff). He observes that while his students are careless with classroom furniture, books, any school property at all—they are meticulous about their own personal items ("touch my backpack again, motherfucker, and you'd best _buckle up!_ "). He observes that all of his students, regardless of their parentage, intelligence, or socio-economic status, have the same number of hours in the day as Michelangelo did. If Mathilda students don’t have Michelangelo’s talent…well, that just means they’ll all have to work harder. They’ll have to make do.

He starts asking Ray to hand out any materials that need to move from one side of the trailer to the other…books, dictionaries, dittos, anything that will get him up and out of his seat. He tells Lilley that he will accept writing assignments in the form of a screenplay, as long as it is a well-written, syntactically correct screenplay. He even recommends a couple of films the kid might like, things that tie in with his Greco-Roman class. He stacks the tattered dictionaries on his desk and stands silently at the front of the room one day until all of the side conversations die down and he has twenty-three pairs of curious eyes looking at him.

“So, our classroom reference library is now reduced to ten and a half dictionaries, some random pages, and my increasingly frail and etiolated hopes for your futures as literate citizens.” It’s a trick he’d learned from listening to Brad: instead of trying to simplify his vocabulary and syntax, he actually makes it more complex. If his students want to understand him, they will have to listen. If they don’t understand him, they will have to advocate for themselves. And they do.

A hand shoots up. “Uh, what does that mean?”

“That means, for our research project, I’m instituting a rationing system. One book per group: you’ll have to share.”

Nate’s sister works for a publishing company, and she gets her employer to mail him remaindered books for a tax write-off. (She sends them with inspirational teaching postcards— _to teach is to touch a life forever_ ; _if you want to build a ship_ …—that he tapes to the inside of his plan book where only he will ever see them). He puts the books on brick-and-beam bookshelves in the back of the trailer. Any student at any time is welcome to sit in the back of the room and read. As long as they are working quietly, they have earned the right to be left alone. Whenever a book is damaged, Nate removes it from the collection permanently. He keeps a tally of these lost books written on post-it notes over the bookcase. Although he never alludes to the number, its meaning becomes clear enough: when you disrespect communal property, your own choices become more limited.

Every Friday, Brad stops by the trailer. He brings corkboard and helps construct bookshelves. He silences the generator and shows Nate how to do special effects on the smartboard that actually have students paying attention. He brings Nate a mug of tea after the unaccustomed demands of talking for six hours a day wreck his voice. Nate tries to thank him, but Brad shrugs him off: “Oh, you know me—I’m all about racing to the top, leaving no child behind.”

“How in the world did you end up doing this?” Nate asks one Friday evening when Brad shows up with a rebuilt computer for his classroom. (He’s had a classroom materials request in with Schwetje for six weeks and gotten no response, despite the fact that the vice principal’s suite seems to have more technology than NASA).

“I’ve always like computers,” Brad says. He is sprawled on the floor under two desks, long legs taking up most of the floorspace on the left side of the trailer as he connects the computer to the printer he’d salvaged three weeks earlier.

“No, I mean— _here_ , this school. It’s so…God, chaotic? Underfunded? Poorly planned? Every other person is just waiting to get out, to graduate or retire. And the administration—I can’t imagine anything less like the Marines.”

“You’d be surprised, actually, sir…” Brad replies, grimly. Nate suspects he’s had another disagreement with one of the administrators; lately, such disagreements always seem to end with Brad working under furniture in Nate’s classroom.

“But, really?” Nate feels stupid standing over Brad’s feet, so he drops down to sit on the floor. From here he can study Brad’s face, intent on his work.

“ _Really_ , I got tired of hearing all about how easy it is to fight a war and how hard it is to…I don’t know, build a fucking society.”

“So you thought you’d go in for a little society-building?” Brad nods, twisting a USB head so it plugs into the computer. Above them, the printer gives an encouraging chirp. “How’s that working out for you?”

Brad cocks his head to listen for the printer and when it starts to whir, he props himself up on his elbows and grins. He’s pleased with his work, and the smile is lazy and satisfied and nearly stops Nate’s heart. “Well, to be honest, sir—it’s pretty much like fighting a war.”

 

**+++**

**Remember: your first answer is usually the correct answer.**

Nate feels like someone is watching him and he is smiling almost before he registers that it’s Brad at the door. “And it’s not even Friday.”

“We won’t be here on Friday, sir. We’ll be gorging on empty calories in celebration of the government-sponsored rape, pillage, and genocidal exploitation of ancient indigenous cultures.”

“Happy Thanksgiving to you, too, Brad.”

Brad grunts. “Is the smartboard not working?” He looks unusually serious. Nate follows Brad’s gaze to the cracked old chalkboard, where he has written _ethos_ , _logos_.

“Oh, no! It’s great! Just—sometimes I use the regular board. Call me old-school.” Nate thought that would get at least a smile from Brad. But it doesn’t.

“Ah. ‘Cause I was going to say, if there’s a problem and you can’t get ahold of me, you could get Ray Person to look at it. I’ve been showing him the basics. You know Ray? Skinny junior?”

Nate bites his lip and looks at the half-graded assignment in front of him so he doesn’t smile at Brad’s forced-casual tone. Two weeks ago, a pick-up football game had turned into a fight and Ray had been at the center of it. Nate had heard the commotion during homeroom and looked out to see Ray flailing and cursing at Rudy Reyes, Mathilda’s quarterback and draft-pick hope, from the middle of a scrum in the parking lot. As he watched, Ray had disentangled himself and stalked off, proud and furious as a spitting alley cat, scrubbing at his face with the sleeve of his ragged hoodie. It had been a surprising turn of events: Ray, for all his trash-talking, had always been a fairly peaceful, cheerful student. Nate had dealt with it by giving Walt two hall passes for homeroom and turning him loose. Brad had apparently dealt with it by acquiring a protégé and pretending not to care about him.

“Oh, I _definitely_ know Ray. He keeps crashing my Greco-Roman class to argue about the origins of democracy,” Nate explains. “I’ve been talking with Sixta about reviving the Mathilda forensics team in the spring…I think our Ray-Ray could be a star.”

“Is this Greek?” Brad asks, changing the subject as quickly as he’d started it.

“Uhm?”

Brad is studying the words on the chalkboard. He occasionally licks his thumb and wipes away a chalk smudge. (Nate’s chalkboard eraser was a casualty of the first two weeks of school and he’s never bothered to replace it—now he has to forcibly remove his eyes from Brad’s quick tongue).

“Yeah: ethos and logos are rhetorical structures. I got off on a tangent talking about five-paragraph essays.”

“Could happen to anyone,” Brad says and Nate is glad to hear his familiar sarcasm. Brad’s seriousness was starting to worry him.

“I actually probably know more ancient Greek than modern Greek,” Nate offers, in a blatant bid to keep the conversation going. “How about you? Speak any other languages?”

Brad shrugs. He’s been moving restlessly around the classroom, but now he sits down in the very back row. “About as much barrio Spanish as any other white guy in southern California. Roughly fifty words of Dari, less Pashto. Maybe a hundred words of Arabic. We don’t all have the advantages of your Ivy League education.” He’s teasing, absolutely without bitterness—Nate figures this, at least, is one piece of baggage Brad doesn’t carry. He may want many things in this world, but a Dartmouth degree is honestly not one of them.

“At least those’re languages people actually speak,” Natereplies. “I always thought Arabic would be a cool language to study.”

“They didn’t offer it at your school?”

“Oh, they did, but…” Now it’s Nate’s turn to shrug. He doesn’t know how to say that the Dartmouth students who studied Arabic in the years after 9/11 were trying to get in on the ground floor or the next Cold War. They wanted Arabic as a line on their resume: that had never been enough motivation for him.

“ _Tffadeli_ ,” Brad says.

“Sorry?”

“It’s a word in Arabic. I don’t know if it has an exact translation—you use it when you’re inviting someone into your house, or letting someone cut in line, or if they want to interrupt your conversation. You say, tffadeli. So it’s kind of like, _Sure, come on in, plenty of room_.”

“Tffadeli?” Nate repeats, knowing that he is butchering the pronunciation.

“Yeah.” Brad stands up suddenly, sticks his hands in his pockets like he doesn’t know what to do with them if he doesn’t have a tools or wires to fiddle with. “So, now you know some Arabic,” he says gruffly, “You can impress all your friends in Maryland.”

Nate shouldn’t be so surprised that Brad remembers where he’s from, a small detail in their first conversation, but he is. He begins to understand why Brad has broken their Friday-only routine and come today. “I’m not going to Maryland for Thanksgiving.”

“Oh.” Brad shuffles his feet in the silence. “You’re not?”

“Nah—I’ll wait, go back East for Christmas maybe, when I have more time. I said I’d chaperone the dance on Saturday, so I’d just have to turn around and come back.” Walt Hasser, from Nate’s homeroom, was on the dance’s organizing committee. Nate figures he would have agreed to chaperone, regardless (he has a softness for student activities organizations), but that’s a moot point: it is impossible to say no to Walt.

“Isn’t that why they call it homecoming?” Brad is smirking, which has to be a good sign, right?

“I don’t think it counts if I didn’t actually go to high school here,” Nate retorts. “Not that I'm an expert: I went to an all-boys high school. The Jesuits basically had to import girls in from the convent school across town. During slow dances, we had to leave space for the Holy Ghost. Our homecoming dances were infamously lame.”

Nate is almost waiting for a crack about Catholic school girls, but instead Brad says, “I went to a military school. We didn’t have homecoming at all.”

“You should come,” Nate says instantly, without thinking. “I mean—I’m sure they always need more chaperones,” he backtracks, seeing a startled expression flash across Brad’s face. “And you’re welcome to stay with me if you don’t want to drive all the way back to Oceanside between the game and the dance. That is, of course—like I said, I don’t really have any plans for the holiday. Or the weekend. So you could.” Nate feels like he’s deflating, like he can’t catch his breath. “Stay. If you wanted.”

Brad is looking at him, faintly confused, and then, very slowly, beautifully, he smiles. “Nate. Did you just ask me to the big dance?”

 

**+++**

**Try to get a good night’s sleep the night before the test.**

The Mathilda Memorial High School Bravos lost their homecoming game by 12 points. “Next year!” Ray had crowed to Nate, waving a foam finger labeled _Milwaulkee Brewers_ and towing Walt, still in his marching band uniform, through the post-game crowd.

“There goes the future of our nation—young and stupid,” Brad had said.

“Optimistic,” Nate corrected.

“That interpretation is very—”

“Perceptive?”

“Magnanimous, sir,” Brad finished, but he’d been smiling again. Nate is dreaming of that smile the next morning when his alarm goes off at 5:30, his regular school-day wake-up.

“Oh, good Christ, turn it _off_ ,” Brad mutters, burrowing into his pillow. “T’s Sunday. Sleeping in is one of the cardinal pleasures of civilian life.” Nate kisses his shoulder blade and thinks about the phrase _cardinal pleasures_. “How about coffee in bed?”

“Also in the top five,” Brad says without opening his eyes. “Especially if it comes with leftover pie.”

There _is_ leftover pie, pumpkin pie. (You can buy anything at the Mathilda Wal-Mart, up to and including a last minute Thanksgiving dinner.) It’s in Nate’s fridge, right under the clear plastic box holding the corsage Brad had brought him the night before.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a prize for n00blicious from the Semper Hi-Fi Audiofic Challenge. Needless to say, totally fictitious: I know almost nothing about schools or volunteer organizations in schools, except from the perspective of the student. I stole the school/clothing analogy (you'll know it when you see it) from a professor at Princeton and the epigraph is from a letter by Thomas Jefferson. Now with some sequels on LJ...


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